Every day Pollard remains in prison is an attack on the freedom and security of the American Jewish community.

The expressions of shock and indignation that accompanied Edward Snowden’s
revelations that the United States uses signal intelligence assets to spy on its
allies were more than a little disingenuous. Everybody knows that everybody
spies on everybody. If Germany’s spy agencies can, they are most certainly
listening to the cellphones of friendly leaders from Washington to Paris. Allies
routinely use signals intelligence, and human intelligence and everything in
between to uncover information that their allies seek to keep from
them.

In the case of the US and Israel, US government agencies have been
involved not merely in spying against Israel, but in bids to undermine American
public support for Israel almost since the establishment of the Jewish
state.

According to a new history of the CIA’s involvement in the Middle
East, America’s Great Game, reviewed this week in The Wall Street Journal, in
1951 Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA’s operations chief in the Middle East set up a
fake anti-Israel lobby in Washington called American Friends of the Middle East.
Its job was to weaken popular support for the Jewish state. The CIA’s
anti-Israel front group operated for 16 years, until the fact that it was a CIA
front group was exposed in 1967 by the far-left Ramparts magazine.

And
this brings us to Jonathan Pollard, the American Jewish naval intelligence
analyst who is now serving the 29th year of his life sentence for transferring
classified materials to Israel.

Snowden’s revelations and the story of
the CIA’s anti-Israel front group in Washington make clear that US indignation
over Israel’s fielding of an agent in Washington was equal parts
self-righteousness and hypocrisy.

There was nothing extraordinary in
Israel’s efforts to gain information that its American ally didn’t wish to share
with it. Allies spy on each other. And they use sympathetic locals to achieve
their ends. South Korean Americans have been caught spying for South Korea.
Taiwanese Americans have been caught spying for Taiwan, and so on.

US
prosecutors prosecuted, and US judges convicted these agents of friendly
countries for their criminal activities. The average prison term meted out to
such agents of friendly governments runs from four to seven years. Their average
time served in prison is two to four years.

Pollard was different not
because of what he did, nor even, necessarily because he transferred classified
information to Israel rather than to Britain.

Pollard was unique because
he was an American Jew transferring classified information to Israel. And the
discriminatory treatment he has received from the US government owes entirely to
the same institutional anti-Jewish bias that caused the CIA to form the first
anti-Israel lobby in Washington, just three years after Israel gained
independence.

As former CIA director R. James Woolsey explained to
National Public Radio in March, “I really take the view now that if someone says
[Pollard] should not be released after 28 years, just pretend that he’s a
Filipino American or a Greek American and pardon him. I see no reason why people
should treat a Jewish American who spied for Israel on those grounds more
harshly than they treat a Filipino American who spied for the Philippines or a
South Korean American who spied for South Korea.”

Pollard’s prolonged
imprisonment, and the fact that the criminal justice system has been used
against him in such a profoundly discriminatory manner have brought about a
situation where his only chance of early release is through a Presidential grant
of clemency.

On Tuesday, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson – a
close supporter of President Barack Obama – became the latest in a long line of
senior US officials from both parties who have called for Obama to commute
Pollard’s sentence.

In his letter to the president, Richardson wrote, “In
my view, there is no longer a need for a discussion today. Virtually everyone
who was in a high position of government – and dealt with the ramifications of
what Pollard did at the time – now support his release.”

Given the gross
anti-Jewish prejudice at the heart of the US government’s mistreatment of
Pollard, every additional day he remains in prison is an attack on the freedom
and security of the American Jewish community. As long as an American Jew is
held in prison so unjustly – and in failing health – simply because he committed
his crime as an American Jew, the American Jewish community is being
discriminated against as a community. Pollard received, and continues to receive
unequal treatment under the law because he is a member of the American Jewish
community.

The state of the American Jewish community is far weaker today
than it was when Pollard was railroaded into his life term in 1985. Amid the
mass assimilation rates reported by the recent Pew survey of American Jews,
characterized among other things by weaker levels of communal identification,
anti-Semitic attacks against Jews is on the rise. And with an increasingly
fragmented community, it is becoming more and more difficult for American Jews
to defend their communal rights as Jews to equal protection under the
law.

According to FBI data, Jews were the target of nearly two-thirds of
religiously motivated hate crimes carried out in the US in 2012. According to
the Anti-Defamation League, the FBI data actually understated the problem
because less than 75 percent of the law enforcement agencies in the US provided
the bureau with their hate crime data. The ADL’s data show a 28 percent rise in
anti-Jewish attacks in New York during 2012.

And it’s not simply that
violence against Jews is rising. The rising violence is being met by
unprecedented silence or even support of the violence by American leaders. In
recent months, Jews of all ages have been the victims of the so-called “knockout
game” in which groups of black Americans walk up to an unsuspecting Jew and
sucker punch him or her. The same Obama White House which has placed itself at
the center of several cases of perceived abuse of African Americans has remained
silent about clear cases of African American hate crimes against Jewish
Americans.

Even worse, at least one politician has made statements
defending the anti-Jewish violence. In a Facebook post on the rash of
anti-Jewish attacks by blacks in Crown Heights, Laurie Cumbo, a recently elected
New York City Council member from Crown Heights justified the
attacks.

She wrote, “Many African American/Caribbean residents expressed
a genuine concern that as the Jewish community continues to grow, they would be
pushed out by their Jewish landlords or by Jewish families looking to purchase
homes.”

Cumbo’s remarks received wide coverage, and a week after writing
them, she apologized. But her dim view of Jews, and others who work hard and
succeed may well be shared by New York’s mayor elect Bill de Blasio. During the
1980s, de Blasio worked on behalf of Nicaragua’s Communist Sandinista regime. He
supported them even as they led a concerted campaign against Nicaragua’s Jewish
community, expropriated Jewish property, firebombed a synagogue and transformed
it into a Sandinista youth center as the Jews of Nicaragua fled to
Florida.

The American Jewish community faces these increased levels of
attacks at a time when radical leftist Jews are using the fact of their
Jewishness to attack the very notion of Jewish rights. Consider a recent event
at Swarthmore College.

On Sunday, the board of Swarthmore College’s
Hillel unanimously agreed to defy guidelines set by the national Hillel
organization barring campus Hillel’s from hosting or otherwise giving assistance
to anti-Zionist organizations.

Rejecting Hillel’s positions, the
Swarthmore Hillel board declared, “We do not believe it is the true face of
young American Jews.”

Congratulations for the board’s decision streamed
in from Jewish leftist groups at Harvard and other institutions.

Hillel’s
national organization did not take Swarthmore’s Hillel board’s decision lying
down.

Tuesday, Hillel’s new president and CEO Eric Fingerhut informed the
Swarthmore branch that it cannot continue to refer to itself as Hillel if it
goes forward with its resolution rejecting the organization’s
guidelines.

Fingerhut’s swift rebuke and warning to the Swarthmore branch
must be applauded. Both in passing the guidelines and in standing up for them,
Hillel has made clear that being a Jewish group claiming to speak for Jews has
to mean something.

Zionism is the Jewish national liberation movement,
and Israel is the national home of the Jewish people. To be an anti-Zionist is
to reject the right of the Jewish people to freedom. To be anti-Israel is to be
anti-Jewish. And a Jewish group cannot support an anti-Jewish group without
losing its meaning, and betraying the Jewish people.

Likewise, the
American Jewish community cannot remain a community in any meaningful sense of
the word if it does not defend Jewish rights.

And this brings us back to
Jonathan Pollard, in failing health, in his 28th year in prison. Committed
American Jews, among them are many Jewish leaders that have been grappling since
Pew published its findings in October, with the question of how to inspire the
community to revitalize itself and recommit itself to Jewish continuity and
Jewish rights.

The answer may very well be: By standing up for Pollard
and demanding his immediate release from prison.

Pollard’s plight can and
should serve as a lightning rod for communal action because there is no clearer
case of anti-Jewish discrimination by the US government than his continued
imprisonment.

Pollard’s case is meaningful because it is hard.

It
isn’t easy to defend Pollard. He betrayed the US government.

But the
government’s disproportionate and unjust treatment of him owes entirely to the
fact that he is an American Jew. Until he receives justice, no American Jew can
be certain that his or her constitutional right to equal protection under the
law will be respected. Defending Pollard means defending Jewish rights. And
defending Jewish rights also involves communal identification in a deep and
significant way.

Moreover, at a time when increasing numbers of
assimilated American Jews disassociate with Israel, standing up for Pollard will
relink the community with Israel in a profound and meaningful
way.

Finally, Pollard’s case is a good case to take up as a communal
cause because there is every reason to believe that such communal action can
succeed. As Esther Pollard wrote in The Jerusalem Post this week, during the
White House Hanukka party, Obama said that clemency for Pollard is “under
consideration.”

Nothing breeds success like success. A successful
American Jewish campaign to secure Pollard’s release could serve as a building
block to a communal revitalization and renaissance. That is, the worst act of
governmental discrimination carried out against the American Jewish community
could serve as the basis for a renewal of the community at a key moment in its
history.

Sites Of Interest

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